[March 31, 2014]WASHINGTON (Reuters)
— Bariatric weight-loss
surgery on obese patients with type 2 diabetes helped many to get
their blood sugar to healthy levels and to no longer require any
diabetes medicines, including insulin, three years after the
procedure, according to data presented at a major medical meeting on
Monday.

The surgery also helped patients reduce the need for
high blood pressure and cholesterol medicines and led to quality of
life improvements compared with those who received medical
weight-loss therapy, researchers found.

The study called Stampede, which involved 150 obese patients who had
poorly controlled type 2 diabetes for at least eight years, was
conducted by Cleveland Clinic researchers.

It compared two types of weight-loss surgery against weight loss
attained by diet and exercise along with nutrition counseling and,
for some, additional diabetes medicines that can help promote weight
loss, such as Victoza from Novo Nordisk. All patients were already
taking at least three diabetes drugs and at least three heart
medicines.

More than a third — 37.5 percent — of patients who underwent gastric
bypass surgery and a quarter of those who had a sleeve gastrectomy
procedure achieved blood sugar levels below the American Diabetes
Association target and no longer needed diabetes medicines,
researchers said. That compared with just 5 percent of patients in
the medical therapy group who got their A1c blood sugar levels down
to 6 percent or less. ADA recommendations call for A1c levels of 7
or less.

"Initially we thought diabetes was a disease you could not reverse
or end. We do realize now that there may be a treatment that could
end diabetes for some people and that's exciting," said Dr. Sangeeta
Kashyap, one of the study's lead investigators.

Results of the study were presented at the American College of
Cardiology scientific meeting in Washington and published in the New
England Journal of Medicine.

(Reporting by Bill Berkrot and Ransdell Pierson;
editing by James Dalgleish)